The present invention relates to a semiconductor inspecting apparatus, and more particularly to a data transmission apparatus and a data transmission method in the semiconductor inspecting apparatus.
Because of the micronization of a today's semiconductor integrated circuit and the high density of substrate wirings, a circuit pattern formed on a semiconductor wafer is rapidly micronized. Accompanying with this, semiconductor inspecting apparatuses typified by a wafer appearance inspecting apparatus and a scanning electron microscope are demanded to have higher image processing power year by year. Accompanying with this, transmission capacity of image data increases, and higher data transfer speeds are desired. For example, as described in JP-A-2002-223203, in an apparatus typified by a wafer appearance inspecting apparatus and a scanning electron microscope, a huge amount of image data is serially transmitted from a transmitter to a receiver.
Recent semiconductor inspecting apparatuses are finding an increase in the size of imaging pixels and the type of inspection area size, and variations occur in the size of image data to be transferred. Besides a main image data transmission, the control system of an inspecting apparatus itself is increasingly complicated, and needs for the acquisition of monitoring data for debugging are also increasing.
Accompanying with this, within a semiconductor inspecting, many types of data transmission systems are required in terms of bus width and the magnitude of transmission capacity. To meet these needs, LSIs suitable for individual transmission systems have been individually developed and applied. Technologies for easily solving these needs are described in “SerialLite MegaCore Function User Guide”, Altera Corporation, http://www.altera.com/literature/ug/ug_sl.pdf and “Aurora Protocol Specification”, Xilinx Inc., http://www.xilinx.com/aurora/aurora_protocol_member/aurora_protocol_spec_sp002.pdf. These describe the binding of serial transmission control cores within a customizable LSI to achieve variable transmission capacity. Moreover, to flexibly respond to the magnitude of transmission capacity and bus width of transmission systems, general-purpose data transmission system technology having a width conversion mechanism is described in JP-A-2003-308694.